Sunday, July 24, 2011

On this official first day of New YorkState’s Equal Rights Marriage Law for same sex couples, I ran into this document, perhaps guided by the great spirit.

Apparently, long before the Christian Right Haters got together with their manufactured “Christian” Public Relations Sharia document of the Manhattan Declaration, there were some divinely inspired souls out west, ahead of the humanity curve, who came together and write The Phoenix Declaration.

“We stand in solidarityas those who are committed to work and pray for full acceptance and inclusion of GLBT persons in our churches and in our world. GLBT persons are condemned and excluded by individuals and institutions, political and religious, who claim to be speaking the truth of Christian teaching. This leads directly and indirectly to intolerance, discrimination, suffering, and even death. Political and religious rhetoric has monopolized the public perception of the stance of Christian persons on this issue. This stance continues to cripple the spirit of innocent people. The Christian faith compels us to be part of the healing for the souls wounded by this tragic, violent, and destructive hatred. Therefore:

We stand withthe countless Christian ministers, scholars, and laity who, from prayerful study of the scriptures and Christian tradition, find no rational biblical or theological basis to condemn or deny the rights of any person based on sexual orientation. The essence of Christian life is not focused on sexual orientation, but how one lives in relationship with God with compassion toward humanity….”

Long before there were words on any paper, there was Jesus in the flesh, preaching and practicing his special humanity.

You cannot fit Jesus’ heart onto any piece of paper or into any book(s). It is just too big.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

-I had a nightmare last night. I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet.

I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the 1970s.

I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church again.

All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag. That fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in World War Two.

The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then, if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.

On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory workers.

Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence. In retrospect, the image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes.

I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at the same time. The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was “Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare.

In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly.

Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II. Well Vatican II did not change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics. Oh there were protestants out there. We saw their churches dotting the landscape. Never saw who entered those houses of worship on Sundays. Didn’t care. The predominant local culture was of Irish Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools.

In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal. They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights. But somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968. They never told me directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968, I figured that out later along the timeline.

I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline, and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a Catholic from birth. Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin Luther King.

I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant (after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on him), for the slain civil rights leader. Huh?

It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves Christian. Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen years of a Catholic life. I heard the word but in conjunction with other words like Christian Doctrine etc.

(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled in laughter.)

Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State Legislature.

Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of place. But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted. “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” I have already shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly. There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about birth control.

Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth control. Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of dealing with our own individual sexuality. (No user manual necessary.)

The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bring Pennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law (Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality.

Mullen, backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard &Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary next year.

While Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow against hypocrites.

Last week Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair," vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic, atheistic philosophy."

In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in birth control.

Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the culture war on abortion. The discussion regarding sexuality was not about choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.

My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media voice . It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off, that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in Harrisburg. Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future landscape. Pity.

I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t praising, drooling on, the guys in red are the ones that wonder why priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily. Considering what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore.

After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated bread? (And the collection plate?)

The American culture wars are far from over. The best, I fear, is yet to come.

-There are places on this planet and in the United States I would not like to live. They are places here where the local legislatures want to legislate their own regional (?), personal (?), morality (?).

There are places in the USA where dinosaurs never died out it would seem, or at least they have been sighted in living memory, like in the past 6,000 years, places in the center of the continent, places from Texas north to the Canadian border. It is a place I label as the Dinosaur Belt in geographic terms.

We all know what cokehead Sigmund Freud said about anatomy “being destiny”. But should a drug addict with a PhD. know or have the final word on the evolution of half the human species?

In the spirit of the myth of the gift of “free choice” that the Christians attribute to coming from their mean spirited desert god (with a penis), some recently fallen legislatures in the 2010 election, some holier than thou class of Christian legislators (not all Christians are this insane, including myself), are legislating what you can or cannot do with a women’s vagina.

The Cultural War in America, to paraphrase cokehead Freud, starts and ends with a woman’s right to choose control over various aspects of her anatomy, and is simply a matter of geography these days.

Don’t know what is in the fracked drinking water in these states but it is more than likely the GOP/Church Party and its race to the past, is somehow mixing metaphors, mixing morality with science, mixing old fashioned common sense with online video games (Grand Theft Women’s Rights) – whatever – I don’t know.

In any case, some of this legislation to Frack women’s rights with a combination of Geo. Bush (I&II) along with methamphetamine lab residue and a need for a cheap natural Viagra like product - puts some of these new and proposed anti-vagina legislative laws in a league of their own, out there in the Dinosaur Belt from Alabama to Idaho.

Some of this old time religion mixed with Doctor Frankenstein science scares the shit out of me. Perhaps I am overly sensitive or just merely human.

Alabama, considered by NARAL to be at the bottom of the list in reproductive rights, has decided that worst isn’t bad enough. The legislature is considering a “personhood” law that would define fertilized eggs as persons. Laws like this not only threaten abortion rights, but could also be used to ban in-vitro fertilization, prevent non-sterilized women from holding certain jobs, be used to prosecute pregnant and potentially pregnant women for drinking and smoking, and be used to deny even life-saving medical care to women. (North Dakota's similar bill bars doctors from killing fertilized eggs, even during medically necessary care.) One of the most likely results of bills like this is that doctors will be forbidden from treating ectopic pregnancies with drugs, and will be forced to wait until a patient’s ovary explodes before administering treatment, putting the patient in danger of death. Anti-choice activists also hope to use misinformation campaigns that claim the birth control pill is “abortion” (actually, it works by suppressing ovulation) in order to use personhood bills to ban the pill.

For people who basically don’t believe, respect or even understand science, these dangerous little men in state legislatures nationwide in the Dinosaur Belt are enough to give sane people nightmares considering the scope and potential of these matters at hand in the degrading directly the rights of women and indirectly degrading my rights to live in a free and democratic society.

Friday, July 22, 2011

The Reverend Geraint ap Iorwerth of St Peter ad VinculaChurch, Pennal, also cut up pages from the King James Bible to create an artwork.

Unveiling it at a church event, he said it revealed a "cruel and vile God"…

Mr ap Iorwerth told BBC Wales he had burnt scraps of cut up the passages at the public event because he had been making a statement as part of an art experiment.

He said he had had nothing but support from people at the church near Machynlleth, close to the Gwynedd-Powys border.

He revealed his controversial piece of art at an event to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

He said: "I find it highly offensive that people would think I have given my life to serving that type of God and that I would regard the words of the King James Bible as sacred truth.

"I cut out all the nasty bits of that Bible, the language of which is being celebrated all over the place this year, because I don't think you can separate that language from the God it is representing.

I cut out all the nasty bits of that Bible, the language of which is being celebrated all over the place this year”

"I was gobsmacked no programmes or articles are representing the cruelty, revenge and hatred of this version of God."

Most people know now that Rupert Murdoch presides over theNews Corpmedia empire, and that he is fighting for his reputation after being forced to sink his scandal-laiden British newspaperNews of the World, the most widely read English tabloid in the world. But few people know that Murdoch also owns Zondervan, the world's largestpublisher of Bibles. For 23 years, the News Corp family has included the leading seller of the best-selling book in history...

Zondervan, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, also sellsPrecious Princess Bible,Camo Bible (imagine "Holy Bible" on a camouflage cover),Soul Surfer Bible, Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing and 500 other styles of the holy book. The company owns exclusive North American print rights to the popular New International Version of the Bible which it says has sold over 300 million copies worldwide. Zondervan also publishes books by leading Christian authors like Rick Warren (over 30 million copies of his Purpose Driven Life have been sold), Tim LaHaye, Jim Wallis, Eugene Peterson, Brian McLaren and Shane Claiborne...

I should perhaps put a question mark next to the above title. But then no, I am expressing my personal opinion. That opinion came to mind reading of a Fox News “journalist” expressing her intolerant, perhaps uneducated, opinion on that weird network.

Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch’s personal wizard over at Fox News has had Ainsley (I’m a blonde) (yes you are!) Earhardt state that Mitt Romney is not a Christian on the show Fox and Fiends. This when playing up Rick Perry being a better GOP presidential candidate because he is "Christian" and Romney is "obviously not" in her probably prepared and scripted by Ailes response. (obviously - four syllables - wow - Emmy time)

Ainsley no doubt already has dreams of giving Rick Perry an exclusive softball interview on FOX with prepared questions from Roger’s “Brain Room”/bunker in the basement over there at 1211 Sixth Ave in NYC.

Perry may or may not be a Christian, (does he know how to read) but he is a traitor of sorts in that he already has proposed secession of Texas from the union of the United States. That’s treason in my book IMHO.

From what I have experienced in life from Roman Catholicism is that they don’t read the bible as much as they read their catechism. From what I have read and have experienced from knowing Mormons, is that they know more about the bible, old and new testament, than most Christians including god nutter (can he read) Rick Perry or the average Catholic.

Perhaps Ainsley’s bra is on too tight and it is affecting circulation to her brain. Is religion bashing, intolerance, ignorance ( I won’t call a possible slip of her tongue in this instance hate ) - one of her hobbies and or only talents besides reading off cue cards?

I have to wonder when the Mary cult thing in the RC church got started. It definitely was after Constantine hijacked the faith to suit his military and personal ambitions.

In a way the mother child icon is thousands of years old. One has to speculate that maybe all this Mary stuff comes out of Egypt.

There was that church father Cyril of Alexandria who insisted that his coinage of the phrase “Mother of God” was the perfect antidote of whatever flavor of the month heresy was spreading in the young church throughout the superstitious middle east of the time.

“Mother of God” in a way ended the – which came first, the chicken or the egg – Gnostic conundrum of the early church. It does make Mary an equal of Jesus. Worthy of equal worship?

A product of a virgin birth has the same DNA as the parent from which it was cloned, though apparently the sex is different. The spiritual end of the equation or the father or the scientist involved in an experiment of the creation of a child so to speak gets as complicated then in the past, the same as similar real scenarios that exist now in science. It’s all a matter of labeling and marketing the product, is it not?

But let’s put aside whatever religion bashing you might think that this is. In terms of modern reality, if Isis was still a viable goddess worthy of worship by the majority of the population, a modern translation would sell better than the ancient myth.

The modern translation of some future society that will worship Isis again after an atomic apocalypse goes something like this. The last woman on earth went to a still operating sperm bank and obtained the frozen semen of her dead five star general husband, inseminated herself, and the human race was reborn.

In terms of ancestor worship alone, a thousand years down the road, the Isis figure would stand out in all human culture and the story with its plausible historical sequences would be accepted as truth.

“Mother of God” was a term the Egyptians felt comfortable with and in terms of a visual, you have the Isis Horus statue that existed all over the Roman empire from Britain to Alexandria.

In a way I am not sure there was a trinity thing in Egyptian mythology and or religion.

The assertion by some that I.H.S., a Christogram, really represents the pagan trinity of Isis, Horus and Serapis is probably not true.

I do find Serapis to be a fascinating god.He was totally molded by the new Greek rulers of Egypt, the Ptolemies, descendant from Alexander’s conquest of Egypt.The Greeks did not like the mix of animal with humans in the pantheon of Egyptian gods.So, they invented the creature known as Serapis, mixing the name Osiris with the name of a bull god Apis.Serapis was the dominate Egyptian male god for hundreds of years until the last days of paganism at the end of the fourth century.

No doubt when Cyril and his Christian mob took over the last remnants of the pagan establishment, idols got broken or maybe just chipped a little. The horns came off of Isis and the measuring cup came off Serapis’ head. In any case, I have no doubt that the icon of Jesus to this day is really a recycled image of Serapis. A cultural void left by Isis, mother of Horus and dad Serapis soon got filled in with the icons of the new gods of the eastern church.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

There is one of those symbols of Christianity that has always confused me. Nobody ever explained it to me. I never asked. The Catholicism of my youth was pretty much “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it came to theology.

Don’t ask and I won’t tell you - embarrass you in front of a crowd - for asking a stupid question. People with faith or of the faith are not supposed to question anything. Whatever.

I.H.S. A Christogram. From a rather tedious explanation of it from Wikipedia, it is a corrupted or poorly translated, Greek to Latin thing for the name Jesus Christ, first three letters, in Greek or “IHCOYC XPICTOC”. IHC though is something like “Jes” – geez. Sounds more like a street corner nickname for old bro Jees.

Anyway, Latin of the letter I can be represented as a J. Greek letter sigma can be represented as S or C. So over the ages you have JHS, JHC, IHS or IHC.

The JHC is the supposed origin of the Jesus H Christ swear thing. IHS has always been translated on a peon level of understanding as I Have Suffered, the mantra of all good Constantine dying empire beliefs. Suffer now and be happy later. It’s guaranteed.

In other words, ancient and or superstitious symbolisms like Chi-Ro, XP, are iconic symbols hanging around worship places explaining a faith you have but in other languages that you so not necessarily understand.

This whole IHS thing got a run through the corporate cash register with a medieval mystic named Beradino of Siena who wandering all over Italy stirring up local bailiwicks with his vision of IHS in the middle of a Sunburst. (Again, the old sun worship sub-cult of the Roman church going back to the Egyptians).

Always a good selling point to win over the hierarchy on visions with the question of them being bona fide, if the ancient sun god is involved in the background of the sales spiel.

At least San Bernadino was only interested in selling his worship of the holy name of Jesus. He wasn’t trying to reform anything like Father Savonarola or Father Luther.

It is remarkable how in a closed system of medieval theology, how you can come up with a way to sell indulgences and or the scraped paint off the wall so long as you have some reasonably holy person having visions and his or her conduct does not greatly interfere with the weekly collection plate thing. Or “crisis of the purse” as they still in the Roman church discuss the whole matter of the Martin Luther cash flow thingy.

That if you die and people start huddling over your grave and miracles are attributed to you, it is somehow a sign of sainthood of the deceased. Again, whatever. So long as it $ells, package it.

In a closed arena of where theology, with its limits, is allowed to go, a vision carefully screened and considered, an image, an abstract of an idea can become an object of worship. Is this, in a technical sense, just another idol?

(Wrapping oneself in the “holy name of Jesus” is a sign of respect or just another propaganda tool used by corrupt bishops and clergy to hide crimes behind?)

In a critical move to sway the 2012 election, the cynical monarchists in the Vatican are bringing in a RNC favorite to bring order to the chaos left by crime boss Big Frank Rigali in the Philadelphia archdiocese.

Gay hating Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput is being brought in to tow the church party line of total innocence in face of the massive abuse scandal in Philly. A man who does not supposedly believe in the separation of church and state except when the state pays his way tax-free.

A bureaucrat, who gets tax free status on his parochial school system but can reject the innocent children of a lesbian couple in his schools, a move by him and Father Bill Breslin of Boulder that is not being Christian but purely Catholic. (Nothing personal you damned to hell souls etc.)

Great going Chuck. You reek of the redneck Jesus thing! Who are you going to endorse – god nutter Rick Perry or Opus Dei Rick Santorum? (Has to be a man you know – women do not have souls – do they?)

Aging Rigali is moving to his newly built retirement Mcmansion in Tennessee (not pictured above but perhaps similar). Can’t cry poor in the abuse settlements thing and live like a king in Philly anymore in the Bishop’s mansion.

GOP is delighted that the plan moves forward to turn blue state (2008) Pennsylvania back into RED. With Chaput in the pulpit ready to get rid of Senator Casey, a tolerant, weak, human being, Rick Santorum, the only good Catholic man on woman left, will gladly deliver the Commonwealth back to Catholic Jesus Sharia Law.

Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues."

To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned.

Archbishop Chaput has discussed Catholic priorities in the election in 14 of his 28 columns in the free diocesan newspaper this year. His archdiocese has organized voter registration drives in more than 40 of the largest parishes in the state and sent voter guides to churches around the state. Many have committees to help turn out voters and are distributing applications for absentee ballots.

In an interview in his residence here, Archbishop Chaput said a vote for a candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research would be a sin that must be confessed before receiving Communion.

"If you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" he asked. "And if you know you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes."

You may call me nuts! But you can’t make this crazy religious shit up. It is too strange for fiction.

Monday, July 18, 2011

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails, and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like… the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” – C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Is it really less than two weeks since a human interest story on a dead girl Milly Dowler caught traction and in less than a week, the NOTW (News of the World) was closed, and the PM (Prime Minister) and wanna be PM were feigning surprise and anger and were kicking friend/lover Rupert so rudely out of bed? Political whores for sure.

If you step back on a historic timeline, this Murdoch empire gotcha glitch is more like an explosion, something like collateral damage of the implosion already occurring within the family business.

No doubt they already had plans to close the NOTW, and in one more cynical move shut it down as some sort of empty gesture of outrage against the hacking thing.

Fox News here, owned by Murdoch, has pretty much hidden the biggest story about inhumanity on the planet these past two weeks. Ignorance is not necessarily bliss.

I see close to ten thousand tweets and 22 thousand facebook shares on that one article. Outrage spread quickly but you still had to have the one damning piece of evidence of inhumanity for the sake of greed in the form of that one Guardian article.

Now with the head of the Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal resigning and likely to be arrested too along with Rebekah Brooks, it seems as if the bureaucrats cannot move fast enough or get a big enough chunk of bloody meat from the carcass of Rupert’s media empire.

Says something about the real stability of our so called capitalist system. (The soviet system was merely the first one to totally collapse.)

Scotland Yard has got to redeem its reputation fast. The FBI will go fishing and 3-6 months down the road more indictments in the US. Truth to be found or merely more circuses for the starving masses.

Have to wonder why this spread so quickly, and I have to wonder if the economy and the cost of everything including cable TV and the modern day Byzantine kabuki style Murdoch journalism is something that sells well with the bankers and the accountants but not really with the public in general.

Friday, July 15, 2011

"Simply put, in pantheism, God is the whole; however, in panentheism, the whole is in God. This means that the universe in the first formulation is practically the whole itself. In the second formulation, the universe and God are not ontologically equivalent. In panentheism, God is not necessarily viewed as the creator or demiurge. In panentheism, God is viewed as the eternal animating force behind the universe. Some versions suggest that the universe is nothing more than the manifest part of God. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that God and the universe are coextensive, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God. Much Hindu thought is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism."

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Older adults who say they've had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.

According to the study, people who said they were a "born-again" Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or "atrophy") compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again. …

In the study, researchers asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious affiliation, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Over the course of two to eight years, changes to the hippocampus were monitored using MRI scans.

The researchers suggested that stress over holding religious beliefs that fall outside of the mainstream may help explain the findings.

"One interpretation of our finding -- that members of majority religious groups seem to have less atrophy compared with minority religious groups -- is that when you feel your beliefs and values are somewhat at odds with those of society as a whole, it may contribute to long-term stress that could have implications for the brain," Amy Owen, lead author of the study and a research associate at Duke University Medical Center, said in a Duke news release.

Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum seem to be having a love affair. No. Not sex. (Even if that was technically possible for these two.) But I think she is tops in any case.

No. They have been the first Republican candidates in the Iowa Primary to sign some sort of pledge that I label the IOWA HATE PLEDGE. Don’t let the word HATE scare you. The word is not actually mentioned – it is encoded in the message. “Don’t be afraid” like what the average angel will tell you when he is about to deliver a shit filled message from God. You will get used to it. They are only trying to protect us from reality and replace it with their own version of good old fashioned, American Town Square, reality.

This so called proper Christian Sharia Pledge (real name – encoded) is an attempt by God fearing people to finally, once and for all, define what really really is marriage. I have found it wanting in direct clear language.

Why don’t they just say what they really mean to these hick dirt farmers in Iowa who they are really are dissing by their stupid, Hateful, Christian Sharia wish list of all things anti-secular, anti-human/humane.

I have a few editorial suggestions and additions to more correctly add the right flavor to this piece of literary garbage:

Since white people used to be able to act more decent in public, not shout into cell phones, not dress like whores, not slobbering on their sweats over slurpies at Sam’s Club, new rule books of conduct and dress codes in the new Christian world order are available at Bachmann/Santorum election headquarters.

There is absolutely no truth to the secular rumor that high fructose corn syrup causes divorce, that according to one of our agribusiness corporate sponsors.

Dusk to dawn curfews nationwide will begin shortly so people can stay home and read their bibles.

Poor people should just up and die. Don’t they understand like how stupid they are for being poor? Duh! The poor will not always be with US.

Marriage is between one Arian man and one Arian female. (on all other matters of a delicate sexual nature, ancient and sacred Nuremburg rules to be honored)

All Muslim Sharia Law is verboten. Only Christian Sharia Law shall be imposed on this land, God’s country USA.

Online Porn does not sell more in red states. Though a business discount to red state residents should be mandated in a Constitutional amendment.

The word vagina is to be erased from every dictionary in the land. If necessary, burn down the local library that offends thee.

Blasphemy laws must mandate death or deportation back to the land of their inferior ancestors for all who question God and or the one true exceptional A-merican Christianity.

In case you have not heard already, they spy on the dead (necromancy?) in Britain to get the news at the presently defunct News of the World tabloid. Four hundred news staff suddenly unemployed in order to cover the bastards' bloody tracks. A tax loss and a third party to destroy evidence for Rupert's lily white, never touched shit, CEO hands.

All heck is breaking out there in a present political scandal. I say heck. Is it merely a tempest in a British teapot that will not change things here in the U.S.?

The wealth is still too concentrated in the U.S.. The Godfather of Bush’s wars is too huge to fail here. Nor is it likely we will soon see the end of the satanic like truth institution of Roger Ailes' FOX NEWS owned by this present anti-Human/anti-Christ robber baron Rupert Murdoch???

Perhaps though Bill Moyers has already wrote his epitaph.

Found the above on Christian Left Facebook below. Are there really Christians who think for themselves?

Thursday, July 7, 2011

I have to wonder what personal torture that white heartland born-agains have to endure in order to fit into the still existing heartland prairie town square where conformity is of utmost important and existence?

You conform or you get shunned, banished and or killed for your personal instinctual sexual being. The ghost of Matthew Shepard’s memory, of Wyoming hate crime fate, lives on, a victim of being different.

I do not want to say this with anger and or hate. But I think that two suppressed sexual human beings in the form of Marcus and Michele Bachman are hiding behind a cross of confusion in their desire to establish a Christian theocracy in America. It is a life but not much of one IMHO.

The above photo is of a gaydar billboard outside St. Matthews church in Auchland, New Zealand.

An Auckland church known for its edgy billboards has come under another attack from vandals.

St Matthew in the City put up a "gay-dar" billboard on Friday, which shows a spectrum from gay to straight, with a cross acting as a gauge.

A message underneath states: "As used by the Anglican Church to assess potential priests."

Church spokesman Clay Nelson said the sign aimed to highlight discrimination in the Anglican Church against members of the gay and lesbian community.

However, it had already been vandalised.

Gay-dar or gaydar is a word I had to look up very recently. It is a new acronym for gay and radar. Meaning that certain types of body language and or presence supposedly connotes gayness. In a way, gaydar is more often used to taunt children or young people who do not seem to conform even if they are or are not by nature homosexual.

What is the good in this vandalism in New Zealand? At least the topic of homosexuality, a 19th century pseudoscience terminology, is being put on the table for discussion in the Anglican Church worldwide.

Sexuality, and not just homosexuality, is a closeted subject in all of Christianity or so it would seem to me.

I am looking at the current civil rights thing here in the United States regarding legal rights for Homosexual Humanity. And even if I only believe in limited legal connection and not marriage as a right, I have to step back and realize that partial rights are really a statement or justification for no rights.

That the 3/5 clause in the original U.S. Constitution to appropriate representation based on a slave, first as property, and secondly only as 3/5 of a human being status, has long ago been changed in that Constitution.

But this is not about voting rights which is what the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s was all about. That movement’s overall mission was to start establishing the reality of equality by first guaranteeing free access to the voting booth for all citizens.

This present era is bogged down in the decay of old ideas and old prejudices and things long closeted against the rights and privacy of each individual not only in this country but on this planet as well.

That the struggle for humanity throughout the ages has been to find one shiny perfect moment, a city on a hill moment, when man and woman, as part of God’s evolving creation, can stand on stable ground and separate the animal from the divine in our split natures and to maturely recognize the differences. That, and to move on to higher ground and on to true ordained potential.

It is one thing to legislate equality. It is quite another to legislate morality. You cannot legislate what your definition of morality is. Morality is oft times defined by geography more so than by any magic make believe revelation from above any normal timeline and existence.

Somewhere along the timeline, Christianity got obsessed about sex. All sorts of twisted and bizarre justifications for spiritual enlightenment have to do with fasting from sex to get that spiritual high. Rather than having discussion about sex, sex was not discussed.

All sexuality got hidden and closeted. “So deep in the closet – you could see Narnia.”

Anything sexual got put under the label of sin and only the clergy could dole out definition or dispensation on a monopolized area of natural human activity. Bizarre!

In fact, one of the things the first Council of Nicea did was ban self castration as mentioned in Matthew 19:12. There was also no doubt a backlash against the old pagan practice of having sex with a temple prostitute to elevate your spirit and mental being up into your preferred god and or goddess presence. But let’s not go there at the moment.

Never the less, Jesus, in the imperfect account of him in the gospels, does not seem to specifically mention homosexuality. Paul mentions it here or there and usually in a long litany of sins. Though they say that Paul was light in his sandals, I don’t believe it.

I think that Paul, the self appointed “Apostle”, was more likely a victim of a botched circumcision reversal operation so popular with middle class Hellenistic Jewish boys who wanted to fit in at the local gym amongst their gentile peers, so to speak. “Look guys, I fit in, I am just like you now.” (wow)

For Paul, the lack of sex is a good thing, a spiritual thing. But it was his thing. Not necessarily any of our individual things. There are many roads to spirituality, not just one. And so it goes.

When did spiritual enlightenment, in so-called Christianity, get divorced from personal obligation to try and love yourself and your neighbor? Love first. Salvation second. Not the other way around I would think.

When did the privacy of sexuality become the peeping Tom right of civil or church government to interfere in the life of an individual, or consenting adult individuals?

If you are unhappy in your own skins, in your own sexuality dear Marcus and Michele, please do not try to impose your unhappiness on others.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

There’s a lot of anger and hate floating around the Internet these days regarding Michelle Bachmann’s light in the loafers husband Dr. Marcus Bachmann, the deprogrammer for gays, with a mail order PhD. in Chist?ian counc?ling.

God only knows what hell those 23 foster kids went through living in the Bachmann Chris?ian home for thirty dollars a day each, tax free, over the years. Were they there merely as a meal ticket for the Bachmanns or were they there to experiment the new world order on?

It is because the Bachmann’s, in the case with the foster kids, had to send them to public school and not to home schooling like the Bachmann’s five natural Christian programmed children, that is what got future Representative Bachmann all steamed up about the mainstream science and evolution thingies. About those things in particular being taught in the public schools is what started her present career in politics with the sole purpose to shut down public education.

It is their Jesus’ way or the Highway!

It is the least common denominator factor thingy in the ongoing dumbing down of America thing.

This is what I do not like but it is human nature. Cher, on her twatter, sends out an insulting message about Marcus and the whole world, especially the MSM, sits back and reports on the bitch bitch rants of the gay community towards a supposedly Vatican like professional closeted fraud such as Doctor Marcus.

In a way, the Barbarians that Doc Marcus calls homosexuals, Barbarians that must be taught and disciplined, is in a way code talk for the new Christofascism. It is "the way" of the extreme right wing of the Republican party that has hyjacked that party. Making people act against their instincts and or their own best interests is what fascism is all about.

Pro-life is code for the abortion issue and not code for the need for social networks to follow the teaching of Jesus regarding the personal obligation to love your neighbor.

And the name of Jesus itself is code talk, not for the God of traditional Trinity delusion.

Their Jesus is God. Yahweh is Jewish and suspect and the Holy Spirit is any spiel to talk god bullshit and empty the sheep’s pockets. Jesus is God Incorporated and Tax Free for every huckster or used car salesman who can start a store front meal ticket church. Halleluiah!

In fact, for Opus Dei candidates like Rick Santorum or other Christofascists like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann, it is all about appearances no matter how dysfunctional and hell like their domestic family situation is for their children. Appearance and hypocrisy are all that matter in Tea Partyville.

In a way the Fascism in the name of Christ is nothing new in the last century. In a way the very pagan Arian pseudoscience of Creationism, or even the theology of Marx as a Christ substitute, has all been tried and tested in Europe in the nineteen thirties prior to fifty million human beings being wasted in WWII in an experiment to see how far insanity can fly, walk, talk or stick to the wall in any political forum.